BattleStar Galactica 1980 redux
by Calculonius
Summary: What could have happened if they thought things through?


BattleStar Galactica 1980

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"Wait, has anyone thought this through?"

Captain Troy and Lieutenant Dillon paused. They had been heading down the hallway in Galactica towards their vipers to start a mission.

"What?", Dillon asked.

Troy continued, "We're supposed to go back in time to stop Commander Xavier from changing Earth's history, right?"

"Right." Dillon affirmed.

"Is there anything else - anything even more important - that we could stop by going back in time?"

Dillon just gave him a blank look, so Troy pressed on, "How about the cataclysm that ultimately brought us all here - the destruction of the 12 colonies, almost all of humanity, and all of our fleet - except Galactica - when Baltar betrayed us all to the Cylons?"

"Oh Yah..."

They turned and went back to the briefing room to discuss it with Commander Adama and Doctor Zee.

In the resulting discussion, all aspects of it were chewed over pretty thoroughly, since it was not a minor decision, but then it was agreed - Galactica herself would go back in time to try to save the 12 colonies from the Baltar Cataclysm.

They ignored Xavier, since, if they were successful, then the Baltar Cataclysm would never have happened in the first place, so the ragtag fleet would never have been formed, much less traveled to Earth and found it technologically backwards, inspiring Xavier to try to fix that. So, if they succeeded, Xavier would be foiled - would never actually have tried at all to change Earth's history.

Cause and effect got really complicated when time travel was involved. Only Doctor Zee really understood it, and even he was still performing experiments to try to verify what he knew. For example, he'd go back 3 hours to tell himself not to eat a particular menu item and thereby avoid indigestion. From the results of many such experiments, he calculated up a complicated matrix for when cause-and-effect still worked, and when it didn't.

To say it was 'complicated' fell well short of the reality.

But Doctor Zee assured them that Galactica's time travel trip to the 12 Colonies should work as expected, so they went.

They left the ships of the ragtag fleet at Earth, since if the plan worked, then they'd never have come, and if it didn't, they'd be in no more danger than with any other option.

Galactica could travel a whole lot faster without them.

Preparations were done quickly and Galactica left without fanfare. She time-traveled back far enough to give her enough time to fly all the way back to the 12 colonies and still arrive before the Baltar Cataclysm, plus a little to spare just in case.

Once in her own past, she set out immediately.

There were no Cylons to dodge, since the only reason they'd been in the vicinity of Earth was because they'd followed the Galactica and ragtag fleet there, and that hadn't happened yet - if it ever would.

So Galactica made good time.

Having traveled the route once, they knew all the pitfalls they might encounter and the good places to pick up food and fuel, so the trip was uneventful.

They spent the time making recordings to transmit to the fleet and the 12 colonies when they arrived.

Doctor Zee said that information transmitted like that should survive in any case.

So they prepared briefings on things like the situation at Carrillon, the location of, and situations on, planets like Kobol, Terra, and Earth, plus everything they'd learned in their trip to Earth.

They also prepared recordings about their experiences, including especially the destruction of the fleet and the 12 colonies, and Baltar's betrayal and his continued efforts to pursue them and destroy them. They got the testimonies of as many people as possible, for added believability and perspective.

And similarly they prepared, for rapid transmission, recordings containing all the original sensor information and imagery from both the 12 devastated planets and the fleet's last battle, as well as news broadcasts from the 12 colonies as they were being destroyed.

Galactica only detoured slightly - to collect the BattleStar Pegasus on the way.

She, as they knew, was in the vicinity of Gomoray playing hide and seek with the Cylons there. But while Pegasus alone had to try hard just to survive, Pegasus and Galactica together, plus the element of surprise and Commander Cain's skills as a tactician, were plenty and to spare. They broke free of the Cylon cordon, surprised and destroyed a Cylon Base Ship, collected full loads of fuel, plus some of spare parts and tools while they were at it.

Then they disappeared into the vastness of space.

After a short detour to confuse any Cylons who may show up and try to pursue, they then both turned towards the 12 Colonies, while Pegasus and those onboard were brought up to speed on the situation and on plans for what was still upcoming.

Cain's input was incorporated to their plans, and they used their new stocks of spare parts to make what preparations they could - mostly repairs to both ships. Parts for human-designs were mostly not interchangeable with the Cylon's parts, but a steel plate was still a steel plate, and laser emitters and power packs are quite similar in design simply because they are quite similar in function, and so on. So, for a little of what they picked up they could use it as-is, and for the rest they could adapt it.

And soon enough they were in the vicinity of the 12 Colonies.

They encountered no Cylons on their way - all the Cylon forces were committed to the ambushes.

The Cylons had not had so many ships available that they had anything much to spare after setting up annihilation-level ambushes for both the fleet and the 12 colonies.

Much discussion had gone into their plans.

A major factor in those were that the humans in the fleet, as well as those on the colonies, were very very focused on the hope for peace, so they were very likely to take a while to convince before they would believe that the peace offer was just a ruse.

People tended to cling hard to such hopes.

That delay before the humans of that time period believed and acted - especially given that it was unpredictable in duration and in who would get over it first and to what extent - was central to Galactica's plans.

Because of that delay, the future ships could not count on either the fleet or on the planetary defenses - either or both may become available in time to be helpful. But either or both could also take too long and therefore never become available.

So Pegasus and Galactica had to plan to go it alone.

But Cain's tactical insight made that possible.

The vast cloud of Cylon fighters which had - in the original timeline - destroyed the humans' fleet, had been operating well outside their own maximum range. That had been made possible by 2 Cylon fuel tankers setting up a refueling point for them on their way.

That refueling point was on the path which the human fleet would take from the 12 colonies to the rendezvous point where peace was supposed to be concluded.

The nature of such refueling points is such that the Cylon fighters would be arriving there almost out of fuel. That way you get the most use - the most range extension - out of such a refueling stop.

The most efficient way to set up such a refueling point - since fighters travel at much much higher speeds than fuel tankers do - is to send the tankers first, with a small fighter escort. Then the fighters can start well after the tankers, and travel at their most efficient speed - still much faster than tankers do - to arrive at the refueling point not long after the tankers get there and set it up.

That way you get the most out of your fuel - both the fuel in the tankers and the fuel onboard in the fighters.

And Cylons are highly motivated on the subjects of efficiency and being orderly.

So it wasn't hard to predict that there would be a small time window when the Cylon tankers would be in place - with only the small fighter escort which traveled with them for safety despite the inefficiency - before the massive cloud of fighters arrived which they were supposed to refuel.

That is the small time window that Commander Cain aimed at for his attack.

Given the records they had of the battle, and the fuel states of the Cylon fighters which had been observed at that time, it was easy to predict when that time window would be.

A fighter, even when idle, burned some amount of fuel just to keep its systems active.

Their refueling point was known, and the distance they flew from there to the human fleet was known. So it was easy to calculate how much time they'd idled away since refueling, and therefore exactly when they got there and when they left.

That gave them the parameters for Commander Cain's attack window.

It was narrow, but wide enough.

Both BattleStars screamed in at top speed and blasted the Cylons - tankers and escort alike - to smithereens as they passed.

The massive cloud of incoming Cylon fighters never even detected them, because all Cylon ships - the tankers, their fighter escort, and the incoming fighter cloud - were jamming everything as best they could in order to remain hidden from the human fleet they planned to ambush.

If the Cylons had detected the 2 BattleStars, it wouldn't have mattered, since the Cylon fighters had no more fuel than necessary to get to the refueling point with a small safety margin.

But now there was no refueling point. And the safety margin was not enough to let them fly anywhere worthwhile. They could not attack the oncoming human fleet - if that had been possible then such a refueling point would never have been necessary.

So all those Cylon fighters were effectively dead. They had enough fuel to stay alive - if they remained idle and immobile - for a little while, but not even long enough for the human fleet to arrive and pass them by. So they could do no harm in the time they had left.

Having now saved the human fleet from ambush and destruction, the two BattleStars still needed to save the 12 colonies from destruction. The colonies were a good distance away, and the Cylon Base Stars would already be almost in position - only as far away as was necessary to allow the fighter cloud to refuel and fly to meet the human fleet. They'd timed both attacks to happen simultaneously.

But refueling that many fighters takes a long time, so there was enough time for BattleStars - moving at maximum speed - to arrive at the 12 colonies before the Base Stars.

They'd discussed using time travel to give them plenty of time, but had been disappointed - doing so would complicate the cause-effect matrices way too much for anything to be predictable.

Cain had been especially disappointed - he'd wanted to also attack the Cylon homeworld, which should be near-defenseless right now since they'd committed all their forces to this ambush. But they could think of no way to be in that many places at once, nor to travel from place to place in time, nor to make some variation of time travel allow that while remaining predictable - they didn't want to overreach and have all their efforts undone by an attempt to 'have it all', by, say, one extra time-jaunt undoing cause and effect for the whole enterprise.

So they settled on working up a message trying to convince the human fleet to attack the Cylon homeworld, and a battle plan for them to use if they did. They'd transmit those when the time was right.

Strategy involves a large amount of understanding how people work and therefore what they are likely to do. Cain, being a great strategist had thought it through.

He knew that explanations - especially unexpected ones - tend to meet a certain amount of resistance in proportion to how unbelievable they are.

So they didn't even try to explain.

They just flew right past the human fleet at top speed.

Thereby, they incurred no delay at all in their efforts to save the colonies, and they effectively invoked an entirely different aspect of human nature - curiosity. People want to know the why and how of things. And this too, is often in direct proportion to just how unbelievable they are.

So the human fleet - containing the Galactica from the original timeline - observed two BattleStars hurrying from an area where there should be no BattleStars. And one of them was also the BattleStar Galactica.

Old-Galactica - the one which had traveled to Earth with the ragtag fleet and then time-traveled - waggled her wings as she passed Young-Galactica. Way back when he'd been flying vipers, Adama had always used to do that when passing by special friends.

Two BattleStars Galactica in the same place and the same time - one of them with plenty more scars and patches than the other - was something that absolutely demanded an explanation. It invoked people's curiosity in ways that are almost impossible to parallel.

So all the available communications channels filled with demands for explanations.

Pegasus and Old-Galactica replied. They transmitted all the messages they'd previously recorded. They did so at high speed and high rates of data-compression, so they could get it all across in the brief time they had available.

They sent to the fleet a summary of what had happened, plus all the testimonials, sensor logs, and all the other data.

Once they were closer to the 12 colonies, they'd send the transmissions there too. They did not yet, so it could not be used to warn the Cylon Base Stars in that area that their planned ambush was about to be ambushed itself.

There was one thing they transmitted uncompressed, in real time, and on continuous loop: the transmission from the Council President containing his last words before his BattleStar exploded - where he was agonizing over having caused the destruction of the whole human race by his stupidity.

That transmission, and the rest, caused such confusion while folks tried to assimilate it all, that the fleet coasted to a halt.

The Pegasus and Old-Galactica continued on, unimpeded, to the point Cain had chosen near the 12 colonies.

Then they launched their attack on the oncoming Cylon Base Stars.

Many options, such as surprising them from behind a planet and taking them out with missiles, were simply not available.

The Cylons were doing their best to avoid detection, so they were staying well away from any planet or similar place - anyplace where someone, such as a minerals prospector, might happen to be, see them, and pass the information on.

Besides, they had few antiship missiles. Pegasus had only 4 and Galactica had long since cannibalized hers for parts, so she had none.

With 4, plus the heavy antiship lasers on both BattleStars, they could take out 2 Base Stars, assuming they survived long enough to fire them. But 2 Base Stars wasn't enough - at least 3 Base Stars were approaching the 12 Colonies.

And both Galactica and Pegasus were low on fighters, each was carrying only about half their normal complement.

So they didn't have many good options.

What they came up with was a 'suicide charge' with a purely defensive fighter deployment - using all their fighters to defend against the Cylon fighters. They didn't have enough fighters to do more than that, but hoped to gain time with such a deployment.

So they sped straight in at top speed.

Galactica led and Pegasus followed - behind and to her right - with a cloud of viper fighters around them.

The Base Stars started launching all their fighters, and got enough out to keep all the vipers busy. But they didn't have enough time to get overwhelming numbers out before the BattleStars arrived.

The Cylons, being predictable, fired at the biggest threat first.

That was the Galactica.

She was a big threat because, if she could get in range to use her antiship weaponry - assuming she had a full load of 12 missiles - then neither the Cylon Base Stars nor Galactica would survive to see what Pegasus could do.

And the Cylons could not tell, yet, how many missiles either BattleStar carried. They just hadn't had time yet to scan to that level of detail.

So they made the assumption that was most likely to keep them alive - that the BattleStars were fully loaded and should be taken out before they could fire.

Since Cylons are not needlessly wasteful, they fired only enough missiles to be sure. Three hits from antiship missiles would be enough to take out a BattleStar or Base Star, but to assure 3 hits, more missiles had to be fired in proportion to the distance, since, with greater distance came greater time to defeat, jam, evade, or shoot down the missiles.

So, at the maximum possible range, the Cylons fired 8 missiles. That was only just over half the loadout of one Base Star, so they were confident they had enough ammunition to finish both BattleStars, even if they fired early and often.

But both Galactica and Pegasus had expert crews with tons of battle experience, and Cain had chosen his position relative to Galactica very carefully, to maximize the coverage their lasers had working together.

So the number of missiles that should have taken out one BattleStar were defeated by two.

The Cylons simply fired more.

Their second wave contained the full antiship missile loadout of one Base Star - 15 missiles.

That would have surely destroyed Galactica, except for one thing.

Doctor Zee had calculated that tiny jumps - under a second - forwards in time, had no effect on causation. They could be made safely without the unpredictable results that longer results risked.

So, just as the wave of missiles was about to impact, Galactica jumped forwards in time by a fraction of a second. When the missiles arrived, she simply wasn't there.

Pegasus, knowing to anticipate that time jump, was also not in the missiles' path. So the whole wave of missiles passed by harmlessly and flew off into space, affecting nothing.

Pegasus also, at the right moment, put everything she had into jamming the Cylons' sensors. She managed, by overloading her jammers and burning them out, to deny the Cylons any usable look at what had happened.

The Cylons probably assumed their missiles had been jammed. But they could tell the jammers had burned out during that one use.

So the Cylons, in their ignorance, fired another wave of 15 missiles at Galactica, which dodged with another time-hop as before.

For that hop, the Cylons got a good look, since Pegasus's jammers were burned out and Galactica's could not be used at the right moment for the same reason that the missiles had no effect - Galactica simply wasn't there at the time.

So the time-hop trick wasn't likely to work again - the Cylons would simply shoot at Pegasus instead and, if it came to it, their fighters could take out Galactica.

But now the two BattleStars had closed sufficiently that Pegasus could fire her missiles and expect them all to hit. At close range - where they were - there just wasn't time enough to reliably defeat the missiles.

Two Cylon Base Stars were empty of missiles.

The third one, having fired the first wave of missiles, had only 7 left. She waited until the optimum time to fire those, so she could make sure they'd get kills.

Pegasus fired - just before the optimum time - two antiship missiles at the Cylon Base Star which still had antiship missiles, and one more each at the other two.

Galactica and Pegasus both added in their heavy antiship lasers.

Their expert crews were skilled at targeting, and their lasers successfully hit enemy sensors - a difficult shot.

The loaded Base Star - the one which still had missiles - exploded: hit by 2 antiship missiles and 2 antiship lasers.

And each of the other two Base Stars took an antiship missile and a heavy laser hit each - enough damage to about halfway kill them, though their sensors were far more than halfway dead, given the massive amounts of precision damage they'd taken.

It had been a risk for Cain to fire his missiles when he did, but he was an expert judge of risk and once again he'd demonstrated that.

Now in effective range of their antiship lasers, both remaining Base Stars and both BattleStars blazed away with them as fast as they could.

Galactica and Pegasus once again displayed their expertise, by doing a complicated maneuvering dance where Pegasus stayed in Galactica's sensor shadow but not precisely behind Galactica. So Galactica was all the nearly-blinded Base Stars could see, but when they shot at her, she did another miniature time hop a fraction of a second into the future.

So they missed Galactica.

Pegasus, being not quite in-line with Galactica, was missed too. The Cylon heavy laser shots passed by harmlessly.

That trick probably would not have worked again - there were only so many spots where Pegasus could be hidden by Galactica yet not exactly in-line - but every little bit helped.

Though that volley of the Cylons' antiship lasers missed, the BattleStars did not. Each Base Star took 2 hits from heavy antiship lasers, taking it to 5/6ths dead and seriously impairing its ability to fight.

The vulnerable parts of the Base Stars' sensor systems having already been hit, and their power systems generally not having vulnerable parts, the antiship lasers themselves had been the next best target. So the BattleStars had aimed at those, with mixed success.

The laser emitters were not terribly big when considered on the scale of the rest of the ship. And the rest of the laser systems - all but the emitters - were deeply buried inside the bulk of the ships.

So the targets were small, and dodging as erratically as they could.

Only 2 of the 4 hits took out emitters.

This was still an example of remarkably skillful shooting.

The next volley from both sides happened soon thereafter.

Both Base Stars were hit and destroyed, but before they died they got a hit on Galactica. They'd timed the duration of the previous time-hops she'd made and fired one antiship laser a fraction of a second before the other, so that at least one of the two would hit.

A hit from an anitship laser is significant, and it wasn't the only damage the BattleStars were taking.

Though there were no Base Stars left in the vicinity, they'd managed to launch a large number of Raider fighters before they'd died.

These were more than enough to challenge the few vipers the BattleStars had launched, though they'd launched all that were available to them.

So though the threat to the 12 colonies was over, since the Base Stars were dead and the fighters they'd launched were rapidly burning up fuel in dogfights and strafing runs, things didn't look good for the 2 BattleStars.

Things continued that way for a while.

The BattleStars did the one thing that might have worked - they accelerated to try to leave the Raiders behind. But the Raiders accelerated just as fast to keep up with them.

Flying in more or less straight lines to chase the BattleStars did make the Raiders somewhat easier targets, but it wasn't enough.

The BattleStars were taking a pounding that could only end one way despite their skill and the excellence of their pilots.

That was true right up until the first wave of vipers arrived from the ground defense bases on Scorpia - the closest of the 12 Colonies.

They'd been delayed by sabotage in the flight-control tower and the launch bay doors. And while they had not yet fully believed the transmissions Old-Galactica and Pegasus had beamed to them, it wasn't too hard to convince them to launch fighters to help BattleStars obviously in trouble nearby.

The vipers from Scorpia made all the difference.

They made short work of the remaining Cylon Raiders, then landed on the BattleStars to refuel.

The ones that landed on Galactica had an interesting experience.

Doctor Zee had calculated the possibility that Galactica, having prevented the primary causative events of it's own history, would simply wink out of existence. He'd estimated it as only 45%, which they'd accepted. They went ahead despite the risk, given what was at stake.

The risk was the reason they'd spent so much effort preparing recordings and transmitting them to everyone they could - to preserve their knowledge and experiences just in case.

So when Galactica did wink out of existence, a few landing fighters suddenly found themselves in space rather than in a landing bay.

Luckily Pegasus was still nearby, so they were able to refuel.

With Galactica, had gone Doctor Zee, and the only notes on, or working copies of, time-travel devices. Doctor Zee had had mounting fear that time-travel could cause amazing levels of trouble, and he'd been careful to keep it contained.

The only copy that had not been contained had been on Commander Xavier's ship, which was certain to have winked out of existence now too, for the same reason Old-Galactica had.

Cain wanted to take Pegasus straight to attack the Cylon homeworld, but it was too beat-up. It had taken too many hits from Raiders and from the small anti-fighter lasers on the Base Ships.

He had to dock for repairs and let the fleet handle it.

The human fleet and the 12 colonies did eventually accept the Galactica's story. There were just too many individual data points for all of them to have been faked. For instance, one person seen in the video of Caprica being bombarded came forward and pointed out that the video had shown him wearing a shirt he'd only bought that same morning. One such incident could be explained away as mere chance, but thousands taken together had no other explanation that the truth - that the 12 colonies and fleet originally had been destroyed and that Galactica had time-traveled and come back to save them.

No one was more surprised than Young-Galactica - the one from this time, which had not winked out.

Though they were no longer surprised at Old-Galactica showing up and announcing things, since - in an unexpected aspect of time travel - all the memories of those on Old-Galactica had been implanted in their younger selves. They were surprised at all the things they suddenly remembered from a future - now - would not happen.

In effect, those crewing Old-Galactica had not died or been erased from existence, they'd gotten younger.

Once the humans in general had authorized it, Young-Galactica led the attack on the Cylon homeworld. This happened quickly, as people in general redirected their desire for peace to accept a different form of peace than they'd expected - if the Cylons would not agree to co-exist, then peace could also be had through victory.

Though the attack did not happen as quickly as Cain had hoped, it was still in time to catch the Cylon Homeworld nearly defenseless and devastate it.

The information they captured there included the knowledge that Baltar - though he had escaped the human fleet before anyone could detain him, and then joined the Cylons - had simply been executed by Imperious Leader for his failure.

The End


End file.
